New Method for Extracting Phytoconstituents from Plants

The present work is in the technical field of plant extraction. More particularly, the work relates to the extraction of medicinal plants using liquid nitrogen in a closed environment. The principal objective of this work is to provide a new method of plant extraction using liquid nitrogen which is simple, safe and less time consuming as compared to the existing open method of plant extraction using liquid nitrogen. The plant used for the study was Cynodon dactylon (Linn.) Pers. The new method includes the steps of size reduction of the plant material, taking the plant material and solvent in culture tubes, closing the tubes properly and dipping these tubes into liquid nitrogen at below -196 °C, melting the frozen material inside the tubes and collecting the liquid extract. The new method of plant extraction avoids exposing liquid nitrogen in open environment and thus avoids the drawbacks of the available methods of plant extraction using liquid nitrogen in open environment.